I pondered this in the sauna, and in my opinion, there’s a communication challenge here stemming from different perspectives, which causes misunderstandings. From the entrepreneur’s/CEO’s perspective, revenue must be generated anew every year, and that requires winning over customers repeatedly. Revenue is like a flowing river that one tries to direct from customers towards the business through operational activities.
Investors usually approach the matter from a different perspective. Annual revenue, in investors’ minds, is like a beautiful piece of cake—something your business owns and can either acquire more of from the market cake or surrender back to it. This approach completely changes the meaning of the message.
When an entrepreneur thinks that this year less has been won, an investor thinks that this year the business’s revenue has been lost. Thus, even if sales to customers might visibly ease in an operational sense, which is reflected in stopping the revenue collapse, the situation is different from an investor’s perspective. Sales are still in a dismal state from an investor’s perspective because there’s still a significant shortfall compared to previous revenue peaks, which doesn’t seem to be closing with small positive growth.
For example, an investor might look at Inderes’ forecasts and conclude that Witted’s sales are still not performing particularly well. It will take until 2026-2027 before sales recover to their previous level of 2023. In this way, even sincere messages from the field about good sales momentum can easily give investors the impression that sales will increase enormously in a short time, and thus the prospects for future revenue development are easily misunderstood.
In my opinion, both of you are speaking sense from your own perspectives, but according to Wiio’s first law: Communication usually fails, except by accident.